Cara Ober layers drawing, painting, and printmaking into mixed media works that reinterpret sentimental imagery. Working in series, Ober combines culturally mediated imagery from children’s schoolbooks, home décor, historical texts, and greeting cards to explore notions of authenticity, appropriation, personal identity, and vocabulary.

Ober’s narrative works utilize specific phrases and fonts to suggest multiple voices, perspectives, and time periods. Rather than illustrating the text, the images create discord, layering metaphorical and nonsensical outcomes over personal notation. These works reveals the inadequacy of words in expressing the complexity of experience, and exploit the multiple meanings within one simple phrase, exposing the gap between meaning and language. Painterly gesture alternately reveals and conceals Ober's imagery, uniting disparate elements into a palimpsest where memory and commentary merge into a visual diary.